Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

We asked DJ Norman Jay MBE, 58, what his younger self would make of him today...

If my younger self could see me now, he’d be scratching his head. I was a free-rolling kid, never very ambitious. Mum and Dad were pretty liberal and I was allowed to travel the country from a young age, going to parties and football matches. If anything, I wanted to be a footballer and play for England or my beloved Tottenham Hotspur.

I’m an old wannabe mod, I guess, an original soulboy, having been through every incarnation of British youth culture since the Seventies

I was in the Cub Scouts and loved camping and all those small-boy things until I discovered music and girls in my early teens. I held my first DJ gig aged about nine at my cousin’s birthday party. She had a little Dansette but no records, so I had to take mine along and stand by the record player all afternoon. It was the short straw in those days because you couldn’t dance or chase the girls, but I was happy because it was my hobby.

Jay at 14, DJ-ing at a friend's party: "I was designated DJ. I missed out on the party. I’m smiling there but I remember really being hacked off."

I got my first pair of Levi’s and my first Ben Sherman shirt at the same age and became a keen follower of youth styles. My younger self would probably say I’d got uglier but he’d be proud of me now because I can afford to look the way I want. I’m an old wannabe mod, I guess, an original soulboy, having been through every incarnation of British youth culture since the Seventies. A rude boy, a skinhead, everything. The only thing I wasn’t was a New Romantic: I wasn’t that into dressing up. And although I wanted to be a punk – a lot of my friends, including my wife, were first-generation punks – I couldn’t afford the clothes. In those days it was also pretty dangerous to be wearing bondage gear as a black guy where I lived in west London.

Jay says his younger self would be proud of his style todayCredit:
Dean Chalkley

I was happy and innocent in childhood until I went to school one day and saw Enoch Powell on TV making his “rivers of blood” speech. Brexit? I’ve seen it all before. It changed me. You grow up very quickly when you’re faced with that open hostility. I only realised later that throughout my formative years at school, there were no black or Asian teachers. My family and friends all craved black icons but beyond Muhammad Ali and Sidney Poitier (still my favourite actor), we never saw them.

Music was always the default for me. I’ve been buying records since I was eight, when my father sent me out to buy our Christmas selection with a £5 note as big as a newspaper. Whenever things weren’t happening I’d find solace in going to my bedroom and playing all my records as loudly as possible. But I never dreamt I’d make a career out of it. When I came out of the tried, tested and failed comprehensive system I started a printing apprenticeship, which I hated. I felt I was being conditioned to be factory fodder.

Sidney Poitier, Jay's favourite actorCredit:
Everett/REX/Shutterstock

I managed to get enough work for music, clothes and football, in that order, then at 19 I saved every penny to afford one of Freddie Laker’s £99 flights to New York to stay with relatives. I played at a block party on the street and wow! That was a life-affirming moment. I came back positively charged, knowing this was what I wanted to do – play music and make people dance.

A group of my family and friends took our home-made Good Times sound system to Notting Hill Carnival on the August bank holiday in 1980, just four years after the famous riots of ’76. Carnival was a place people feared to tread. Wide-eyed and green around the gills, we set about to change that perception. We entered a cauldron – the Wild West – but we held our own that whole weekend and for the next 32 years, and I’m very proud of that.

If you could bottle the feeling at Good Times and scale it up, there’d be no problems anywhere

If you could bottle the feeling at Good Times and scale it up, there’d be no problems anywhere. The crowds were a microcosm of the world, just like the early warehouse gigs I played that my wife used to come to – I guess you could say she was the fan who got the man. And wherever I play today, my favourite audiences are still the ones that look like a melting pot of people. I play the music in a way that encourages that.

I can honestly say I’ve no regrets. I didn’t want to grow up a lonely old man with just a black book full of phone numbers, and I’ve got two sons by my first relationship who are grown up now, and with whom I get on brilliantly. I wouldn’t change a thing. Just keep rolling.

Norman Jay MBE is playing The Big Feastival, supported by NEFF, August 26-28. bigfeastival.co.uk